The Bone House was Dan’s baby, the 12th house to embody his Phoenix Commotion’s wild mix of art, ecoconsciousness and serious attention to affordability — all in Huntsville. Dan and his crew had fashioned the strangely beautiful house out of things destined for the dump: scrap lumber, old signs, old T-shirts. Bottle caps covered one floor, wine corks another. Mosaics made of broken mirrors and old CDs glinted from the walls of the studio in back.

Strangest and most interesting, though, were the bones. After a butcher offered Dan his leftovers, Dan realized that beef bones, properly cut, looked like ivory. He tiled the kitchen counters with squares of them. Little bones punctuated the wood mosaic in the living-room floor. Ribs formed the balustrade on the upstairs balcony, and round bone cross sections tiled the stair treads. Outside, leg bones alternated with vertebrae over windows and eaves. Over one door arched one of Dan’s prizes: a whale bone, a gift from a friend.

Dan knew the bones creeped some people out. But he didn’t care. He intended to rent this house at low cost to an artist, and he knew he’d have no trouble finding takers. And the bones interested him. They were elemental, the structure of life itself. Using them in the house gave them a second life — the kind of second life, the kind of recycling and rebirth, that Phoenix Commotion is all about.

After a year and a half in the making, the house was close to beginning that life. When I saw it in December, Dan and his crew were putting finishing touches on the interior of the studio. By February, Dan and his crew needed only to spread rock on the driveway and clean up the site. The tenant, a dancer, was to move in today.

Instead, Dan watched the house burn. He stood on the street, feeling the heat on his skin, watching firefighters struggle to contain the flames. The fire was fast and hot. The enormous cedar beams fell to the ground. The aluminum roof turned to papery ash and sailed out over the neighborhood. The sound was deafening, like an avalanche.

Bone, it turns out, burns just like wood.

The remains

For the first couple of days, Dan mourned. Condolences rolled in from all over Huntsville — proof, in a dark, sad way, that small-town East Texas can claim as its own something as arty and eco as Dan’s houses. At Sam Houston State University, students fashioned an oversize collage card: a memorial to the Bone House. It meant a lot to Dan.

Inspectors told him they weren’t sure how the fire started, only that it began somewhere in the studio out back. They found no evidence of accelerants, no sign of intentional arson.

Houses burn all the time, Dan told himself. You just don’t think it’ll happen to you.

He and his crew assessed the remains. A little of the house’s raised walkway remained, as did the fire pit in the side yard. Everything else lay in a charred heap, most of it burned beyond recognition.

The insurance company had already agreed to cover the loss, but Dan, the master of salvage, hunted for things that could be saved. At the junction box, copper wiring had melted into a puddle. “A flower,” Dan considered the abstract metal shape — something to weld a metal stem to and make a shiny bouquet.

The salvaged cedar beams, 12 by 12 inches, had been ridiculously oversize to begin with; Dan figured he could plane off the char and still have 11-by-11s.

The yard’s big old trees — a sycamore and a walnut — were almost certainly dead. Dan figured he could cut them up to bits and use their wood in a floor mosaic. “Kiln-dried wood!” he joked grimly.

His wife, Marsha, took home charred wine corks, part of a stash Dan had kept on the site. An artist, she intended to draw with them — to make art about the Bone House out of its own charred remains.

In the rubble where the studio once stood, Dan’s assistant Josh Starkey excavated the remains of their tools. The complicated electric ones had turned to puddles; pneumatic nail guns became silvery metal squiggles, reusable perhaps in a metal-flower bouquet. But many of Dan’s antique tools survived, as did the simplest bits of metal: drill bits, carving tools, Allen wrenches, chisel blades. He sent them out for straightening, new handles. New life.

Phoenix and ashes

Dan hired a friend from Huntsville’s recycling company to clean the site. With a Hitachi excavator, he loaded blackened wreckage into a dump truck, pausing to remove from the machine’s jaws any bit of metal that could be recycled.

Dan and Josh watched from the edge of the ash, next to the fire pit, where they threw melted bits and bobs that might be salvageable. Dan, naturally upbeat, said he was through blubbering. Sometimes he worked his cell phone, trying to locate free or ultracheap materials to rebuild the Bone House. Sometimes he stopped to talk to gimme-capped friends who stopped by the site, offering the tough-guy comfort that East Texans give.

Josh, in leather gloves, his face smudged with ash, said some of their losses couldn’t be recovered. “Where do you get another whale bone?” he asked.

But Dan was more interested in moving on, in starting to rebuild. He carried with him his new yellow building permit. He talked about the name of his company. The “Phoenix” part used to be purely a metaphor about rebirth and reuse, he said. Now they had actual ashes to rise from.

The next Bone House, Dan said, won’t be the same as the old one. Like all his houses, it’ll grow out of whatever imperfect materials he can scrounge. Dan didn’t yet know exactly what they’d be.

But he was sure this house would incorporate some of the blackened, melted remains of its predecessor. This time, it’ll be a house not just of bone but of bone and fire.